WTKR (channel 3) is a television station licensed to Norfolk, Virginia, United States, serving the Hampton Roads area as an affiliate of CBS. It is owned by the E. W. Scripps Company alongside Portsmouth-licensed WGNT (channel 27), an independent station. The two stations share studios on Boush Street near downtown Norfolk; WTKR's transmitter is located in Suffolk, Virginia.

The station was founded as WTAR-TV by radio station WTAR and began broadcasting on April 2, 1950; it aired on channel 4 until it moved to channel 3 in 1954. It was the only television station in Hampton Roads for its first three years, having been one of the last new station permits awarded before a years-long freeze on station grants by the Federal Communications Commission, and dominated local news ratings for more than 30 years. The station's ownership, which also included The Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star newspapers, reorganized as Landmark Communications in 1967.

In 1969, a group of Norfolk lawyers challenged the broadcast license of WTAR-TV in a decade-long dispute that involved several issues, including business dealings of the co-owned Norfolk newspapers and cross-ownership of newspapers and TV stations. The dispute ended in 1979 with a commitment by Landmark to sell the television station within two years. In 1981, Knight-Ridder acquired the station and changed the call sign to WTKR. During Knight-Ridder's ownership, the station's news ratings declined; though they recovered for some time under Narragansett Television in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they fell again during the 12-year ownership tenure of The New York Times Company.

Local TV LLC acquired The New York Times Company's television stations, including WTKR, in 2007. The general manager launched a push to "Take Norfolk Back"; Local TV acquired WGNT in 2010, and WTKR increased its share of market advertising revenue and its news ratings. When the Tribune Company acquired Local TV LLC in 2013, the license was transferred to another company, Dreamcatcher Broadcasting, to satisfy cross-ownership concerns; however, Tribune continued providing services to the station. Scripps purchased WTKR and WGNT in 2019 as part of divestitures from Tribune's sale to Nexstar Media Group. The WTKR newsroom produces 46 hours a week of news programs for the two stations.

On April 21, 1948, the WTAR Radio Corporation—owner of WTAR (790 AM) and associated with Norfolk's two daily newspapers, The Virginian-Pilot and the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch—applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a construction permit to build a new television station on channel 4 in Norfolk. The FCC made a conditional grant to WTAR on August 18, 1948; that day, the station announced it would build a new radio and television complex to house its radio operations and the new channel 4. The station divulged more details of the project the next month, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of WTAR radio: it would be a three-story facility encompassing a television studio, a theater with seating for 175, and a 400 feet (120 m) transmitter tower for the TV station. The FCC upgraded the conditional grant to a regular grant on October 7; days before, the commission imposed a freeze on new TV station grants to sort out possible changes to television broadcast standards.

As construction proceeded on the Boush Street facility, in July 1949, work began on the transmitter tower at the site. WTAR-TV also secured a primary affiliation with NBC; network programming would arrive in Norfolk via a microwave transmission system from Richmond, which was on the coaxial cable network for the broadcast of network TV shows. A mobile unit for televising programs outside the studio arrived in Norfolk in December, while the station began broadcasting a test pattern daily on March 1, 1950.

WTAR-TV formally began broadcasting on April 2, 1950, as the first television station in southeastern Virginia, broadcasting to 600 area TV sets. That evening, 1,800 people filled the Center Theater for the station's inaugural program. Nineteen local programs, ranging from children's shows to an all-Black variety show, were among channel 4's first local productions. In addition to NBC, the station aired programs from the other three television networks of the day: CBS, ABC, and DuMont, channel 4 joining the latter a month and a half after it started. WTAR-TV was the first station to use the Boush Street facility; WTAR radio moved in June 1950, and the building was not dedicated until September. By the station's first anniversary, WTAR-TV was airing 30 local shows, representing ten hours of output a week, and more than half the top TV shows in the country.

In April 1952, the FCC lifted the freeze after three and a half years with major changes to television allocations, including the addition of ultra high frequency (UHF) channels to the existing 12 in the very high frequency (VHF) band and new station spacing requirements. In doing so, it made a total of 30 changes to the channels of existing stations, including WTAR-TV, which would be moved from channel 4 to channel 3. WTAR-TV was successful in rebuffing the originally proposed relocation to channel 8 or 12, both high-band VHF channels that would have required additional changes in transmitter equipment; instead, it received channel 3, which had originally been allocated to Richmond. However, WTAR-TV would not make the channel switch for more than two years, as it paired the channel change with the installation of a new, 1,049 feet (320 m) tower and maximum-power transmitter facility near Driver. The new tower was touted as the highest man-made structure in Virginia. The channel switch took place on May 1, 1954. On that day, the station held a beauty pageant at the transmitter site, crowning a North Carolina woman "Miss WTAR-TV"; the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch called the new tower the tallest maypole in the world.